D&D General The abandoned core monsters of D&D

[Paul Farquhar]

[This was probably cut from later publications because it's from The Chronicles of Narnia]

I'm pretty sure giant animals are not subject to intellectual property law. Do you mean a desire to dissociate D&D from Narnia, which is conspicuously absent from Appendix N? Mr and Mrs Beaver aren't much bigger than real world beavers (which are sizable animals) anyway. Reepicheep is the only really giant animal.

Personally, I think it's because beavers are cute, furry and don't go round attacking people. I can just imagine the reaction if I asked my players to fight giant beavers.

The Mayor: "Giant beavers have built a dam downstream and are flooding the town. Please brave adventurers go and slay this terrible menace and save the town."

Players:

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Cerebral parasite

These where specially designed to make life difficult for PCs lucky (i.e. fudged rolls) enough to have psionics. Since 2nd edition completely changed how psionics worked, they became redundant.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

giant Portuguese man-o-war

These are very Bond Villain-ish. Indeed there is one in Bond pastiche Stormbreaker. Trouble, from D&D perspective, is they are passive, they don't make attack rolls. You see monsters cropping up occasionally based on the idea though, such as the Death Embrace in Call of the Netherdeep.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

In Basic D&D (Holmes, I believe) you stood no chance but to fall before the dreaded doom of the THOUL!

A troll - ghoul - and, I think, hobgoblin (was it?) . I think the lore is they were created by a typo/mistake that was just kept in.

Then you never heard from them again.

The mighty thoul lived on in Mystara in 2nd edition.

 

[Voadam]

I'm pretty sure giant animals are not subject to intellectual property law. Do you mean a desire to dissociate D&D from Narnia, which is conspicuously absent from Appendix N? Mr and Mrs Beaver aren't much bigger than real world beavers (which are sizable animals) anyway. Reepicheep is the only really giant animal.

Personally, I think it's because beavers are cute, furry and don't go round attacking people. I can just imagine the reaction if I asked my players to fight giant beavers.

The Mayor: "Giant beavers have built a dam downstream and are flooding the town. Please brave adventurers go and slay this terrible menace and save the town."

Players:

Similar to Mr. and Mrs. Beaver they are intelligent non-evil NPCs you can interact with. They are specifically noted for being involved in trade and can be hired to do some dam construction for payment in coins. Also apparently there is a default slave market in 1e for their kids which 2e might have wanted to avoid.

"Giant beaver kits of under 8 hit points can be subdued, captured, and sold in the market for from 100 to 200 gold pieces per hit point."

 

[the Jester]

I once had an adventure where giant beavers had built a giant dam that was blocking up a community's water source, so they do have some use.

 

[Voadam]

• Tiamat and Bahamut
• Demon lords: Demogorgon, Juiblex, Yeenoghu
• Archdevils: Asmodeus, Baalzebul, Dispater, Geryon

It is interesting that these top tier beings are generally only core in the 1e MM.

2e ditched the demons and devil stuff in the start of 2e and even in the later Monstrous manual only included a smattering of non lord fiends. For lord stats you have to go to things like the very late Book of Hell to get Asmodeus.

3e was fairly comprehensive on existing types of demons and and devils in the MM but no lord stat blocks until Book of Vile Darkness and Fiendish Codexes and the Demonomicon articles in Dragon.

Orcus is in the 4e MM, Demogorgon in MMII, and Lolth in MMIII. Asmodeus sort of enters core books as a 4e core evil god, but that is without a statblock. Other fiend lords get one off statblocks in various sourcebooks. I think Tiamat and Bahamut get statblocks in the two draconomicons.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Personally, I think it's because beavers are cute, furry and don't go round attacking people.

You've never actually dealt with a real life beaver, have you? They're highly territorial, regularly fight each other to the death for trespassing as young ones migrate in search of their own turf, and while they'll usually flee from something the size of a human they're as dangerous when cornered as a rat - if a rat was the size of a large dog with a bite that can go right through bone. Like most rodents their bite strength is phenomenal, and highly likely to cause infections. One of them maimed a beagle around here when I was a kid, and both my father and I have been snapped at by them when clearing their dams so our whole property doesn't flood and destroy woodlands that have taken a century to grow in. There's nothing cute about beavers, and if they have rabies they're actively dangerous to everything around them.

Upscale them to the six feet or so prehistoric varieties reached and you've got something that's a real threat even to a party of humans armed with melee weapons and bows - and you don't wear armor in the wetlands they live in unless you want to die with your lungs full of muddy water. Dam-building is also immensely destructive to established ecologies, which makes quests to hunt them before they ruin arable land and healthy forest perfectly reasonable adventure seeds - even from druidic types if they can't talk them into moving on voluntarily.

Beavers big or small are one of the few species besides man that severely damage the environment for their own convenience, and the wetlands they form are usually too transient to be worth the damage they deal. The fool things eat all the accessible food too quickly and move on, leaving behind decaying dams and a wasteland of drowned stumps and mud flats that will take years to recover.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You've never actually dealt with a real life beaver, have you?

That's irreverent, It's the perception that matters. Wolves are vicious killers, foxes are sly, beavers are cute. None of these are true of the real animal, but no animal in D&D is a real animal.

 

[Epic Meepo]

Beavers big or small are one of the few species besides man that severely damage the environment for their own convenience, and the wetlands they form are usually too transient to be worth the damage they deal. The fool things eat all the accessible food too quickly and move on, leaving behind decaying dams and a wasteland of drowned stumps and mud flats that will take years to recover.

Now I want to run a campaign where the PCs have to prevent an army of extraplanar beaver-folk from turning the entire Material Plane into a flooded wasteland.